Google Analytics Mobile Apps: A Review

A little while ago, Google Analytics announced the release of an official mobile app for Google Analytics – finally! Although the app is currently only available on Android devices, it’s nice to see Google offering a Google-branded solution. I’m an iPhone user, so I’ll be waiting to see if they ever launch an iOS version – in the meantime I’ll have to stick to apps for iPhone that were developed by very talented third party developers, also reviewed below.

Google Analytics by Google (Android)

The new app has a slick, easy-to-use interface and has a fair amount of customization available, but still ultimately limited in what data you can see and what comes “out of the box.” Granted this is really an app meant for fast check-ins, to give users a quick, high-level overview of how their overall traffic is doing. With a fair amount of tweaking the settings you can still get something that gives you a quick update on specific campaigns, but who wants to fiddle around with settings for that long? It would be great to see dashboards already set up in the tool for site performance, organic trends, paid performance, etc.

Google Analytics real time in the official Google Android app is a nice feature, and could make for a fun gadget at conferences! You can monitor how many people at the conference check out your site after a day of handing out business cards.

Here’s the Google Analytics default dashboard in the Android app. This is where I feel the tool is really lacking – all you get out of the box is daily unique visitors and daily goal conversion rate. I added bounce rate for this screenshot, and I believe you can add more metrics and advanced segments/filters even to help customize (which is definitely a nice feature) but it would be nice to see more data without having to invest the time setting something up, like the traditional “out of the box” dashboard for Google Analytics.

Seeing automatic and custom alerts in the mobile app was a smart add, and unique to the Google branded app. This makes a lot of sense for doing those quick mobile check-ins!

Analytic by Applidium (iPhone)

Analytic has some definite advantages over the Google app for sheer amount of data available without additional setup, but is lacking in that the main dashboard allows for no real interaction (unlike the other reports in the app, which are impressive) and the app’s reports can only be customized by date range.

This is Analytic’s somewhat underwhelming dashboard. Although arguably better than Google’s default mobile dashboard, Google still wins overall because you can at least customize their app’s dashboard. The inability to click on trend lines and blue text (which I connote with links in normal browsing) is frustrating.

The visitors dashboard introduces a pretty sexy feature – see those top ten lists? You can actually scroll those lists individually to your heart’s content, you aren’t limited with just the top ten in the app. Smart!

Analytic’s traffic sources dashboard is extremely satisfying, this is really the depth of detail that I want from a Google Analytics app. A+, Applidium!

Fast Analytics by Fast Fwd Multimedia Ltd. (iPhone)

This one is my absolute favorite, my only wish for this app is that it had more visuals like the other two apps. This app is entirely data focused, which is great for my OCD brain but every good analyst knows you need to present data as text, numbers and visuals in order to translate to the widest range of audiences. There is also no real ability to customize the data that you see. That being said, I love this app, it has a great amount of information available at your finger tips!

The Fast Analytics dashboard. As I said earlier, trend lines or some visuals would be helpful on this report but it is at least clean and easy to read. Switching date ranges is a little finicky as well, you can’t set a custom date range but if you swipe the report left and right you can access pre-set reports for yesterday, last 7 days, last 30 days and last year. This is true on all reports in Fast Analytics.

Here is the traffic report in Fast Analytics. Like Analytic, you can scroll forever in this report, so there is a nice breadth of data. I also like that it includes the raw number as well as the percent of total traffic. Clicking on the arrows to the right takes you to the referring site.

And finally, the keywords report in Fast Analytics. You can scroll forever here too. Clicking the arrows on the right takes you to a Google search for that keyword so you can get a feel for its rank, however since ranking algorithms on mobile devices differ from rank on desktops I’m not sure how accurate it is to be looking at rank this way. Still, could be handy as a starting point.

Fast Analytics also gives you a similar dashboard for browsers (including a slick dropdown for browser versions) and a Countries report, although you can’t break it down by region/state.